Load balanced and constant stretch routing in the vicinity of holes in WSNs

Abstract

Because of its simplicity and scalability, geographic routing is a popular approach in wireless sensor networks, which can achieve a near-optimal routing path in the networks without holes (i.e., regions without working sensors). With the occurrence of holes, however, geographic routing faces the problems of load imbalance and routing path enlargement. In the literature, several proposals have attempted to fix these issues, but the majority of them considers only the cases when both the source and the destination stay fairly far from the holes. Recently, a few work has been proposed to tackle the problem of routing in the vicinity of routing holes. However, none of them addresses the two problems (i.e., load imbalance and routing path enlargement) concurrently, and none of them can solve the problem of load imbalance thoroughly. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach in dealing with routing in the vicinity of holes, that is the first to target and solve both the load imbalance and path enlargement problems. The theoretical analysis proves that the routing path stretch of our proposed protocol can be controlled to be as small as 1 + e (for any predefined e> 0) and the simulation experiments show that our protocol strongly outperforms the existing protocols in terms of load balancing.